The price of history

What does history still demand of the Russian proletariat in order to
legitimize and make permanent its conquests? What further price of
blood and sacrifice does this absolute monarch of destiny claim of
men?

The difficulties and objections which the proletarian revolution must
overcome have shown themselves immensely superior to those of any
other revolution of the past. These tended only to correct the form of
national and private property in the means of production and exchange;
they affected a limited part of assembled humanity. The proletarian
revolution is the maximum revolution: since it wishes to abolish
private and national property, and abolish classes, it involves all
men, not just a part of them. It obliges all men to move, to take part
in the struggle, to participate openly. It fundamentally transforms
society: from a multi-cell organism; it places at the base of society
the organic nuclei of that same society. It constrains all of society
to identify itself with the State, it requires that all men be
spiritually and historically conscious. Therefore the proletarian
revolution is social: therefore it must overcome unprecedented
difficulties and objections, therefore history demands for its
successful outcome monstrous prices such as those the Russian people is
constrained to pay.

The Russian revolution has triumphed up to now over all the objections
of history. It has revealed to the Russian people an aristocracy of
statesmen which no other nation possesses; they are a couple of
thousand men who have dedicated their lives to the (experimental)
study of political and economic science, who for decades in exile have
analyzed and dissected all the problems of revolution, who in the
struggle, in the unequal duel against the power of Tsarism, have
tempered their characters like steel, who, living in contact with all
the forms of capitalist civilisation of Europe, of Asia, of America,
immersing themselves in the world currents of trade and history, have
acquired a consciousness of exact and precise responsibility, cold and
cutting like the sword of the conquerors of empires.

The Russian communists are a leading caste of the first order. Lenin
has shown himself, testify all who have approached him, to be the
greatest statesman in contemporary Europe; the man who freed the
prestige, which inflames and disciplines peoples; the man who manages,
in his vast brain, to dominate all the social energies of the world
which can be turned to the service of the revolution; who holds in
check and beats the most refined and vulpine statesmen of the
bourgeois routine.

But something else is the communist doctrine, the party which
propagates it, the working class which consciously embodies it,
something else is the immense Russian people, broken, disorganized,
cast into a dark abyss of poverty, barbarism, anarchy, of dissolution
by a long and disastrous war. The political greatness, the historical
masterpiece of the Bolsheviks consists exactly of this: in having
raised the fallen giant, in having given back (or given for the first
time) a concrete and dynamic form to this debacle, to this chaos; in
having known how to weld the communist doctrine with the collective
consciousness of the Russian people, in having laid the solid
foundations on which the communist society has begun its process of
historical development, in having, in a word, historically translated
into experimental reality the Marxist formula of the dictatorship of
the proletariat. The revolution is such and not an empty bladder of
demagogic rhetoric, when it embodies itself in a type of State, when
it becomes an organized system of power. A society does not exist if
not in a State, which is the source and the end of all law and of all
duty, which is the guarantee of permanence and of the success of every
social activity. The proletarian revolution is such when it gives life
to a typically proletarian State, keeper of proletarian law, which
develops its essential functions as emanation of proletarian life and
power.

The Bolsheviks have given state form to the historical experiences of
the international working and peasant class; they have organized in a
complex and flexibly articulated organism its most intimate life, its
tradition and its deepest and most loved spiritual and social
history. They have broken with the past, but they have continued the
past; they have split a tradition, but they have developed and
enriched the lively tradition of the proletarian, worker and peasant,
class. In this they have been revolutionary, because they have
instilled new order and discipline. The break is inevitable, because
the essence of history enters, it is without the possibility of
turning back, for otherwise an enormous disaster would fall on Russian
society. And so begins a formidable duel with all the necessities of
history, from the most elementary to the most complex, which it is
necessary to incorporate into the new proletarian State.

The new State needed to win the support of the loyal majority of the
Russian people. It needed to reveal to the Russian people that the new
State was its State, its life, its spirit, its tradition, its most
precious asset. The State of the Soviets had a leading caste,
the Bolshevik Communist Party; it had the support of a social minority
representing the consciousness of the class, of the vital and
permanent interests of the whole class, the industrial workers. It has
become the State of the whole Russian people and thus the assiduous
and incessant work of propaganda, of enlightenment, of education of
the exceptional men of Russian communism, led by the clear and direct
will of the master of all, Nikolai Lenin [sic], has gained the
tenacious perseverance of the Communist Party, the trust and the
enthusiastic loyalty of the workers. The Soviet has shown itself
immortal as the form of organized society which adheres flexibly to
the multiple permanent and vital (economic and political) needs of the
grand mass of the Russian people, which embodies and satisfies the
aspirations and hopes of all the oppressed of the world.

The long and wretched war had left a sad inheritance of poverty, of
barbarism, of anarchy; the organization of social services was broken;
human society itself had broken down into a nomadic horde of those
without work, without will, without discipline, a dull material in
decomposition. The new State is collecting from the ruins the worn
fragments of society and is reassembling them, rewelding them: it is
recreating a faith, a discipline, a soul, a desire of work and
progress. A task which could be the glory of a whole generation.

It is not enough. History is not satisfied with this proof. Formidable
enemies are lined up implacably against the new State. False coin is
struck to corrupt the citizen, his hungry stomach is
tantalized. Russia has been cut off from every exit to the sea, from
all traffic, from any solidarity; it has been deprived of the Ukraine,
of the Donetz basin, of Siberia, of every market for raw materials and
foodstuffs. On a front of ten thousand kilometres armed bands threaten
invasion: uprisings, betrayals, vandalism, acts of terrorism and
sabotage have been bought. The most acclaimed victories are
transformed, by treachery, into sudden reverses.

No matter. The power of the Soviets resists: from the chaos of the
disaster it creates a powerful army which is becoming the backbone of
the proletarian State.

Squeezed by immense antagonistic forces it finds in itself the
intellectual vigour and the historical flexibility to adapt to the
necessity of the situation, without yielding, without compromising the
happy process of development towards communism.

The State of the Soviets thus shows itself to be a fatal and
irrevocable moment of the fatal process of human civilization, to be
the first nucleus of a new society.

Since other states cannot coexist with proletarian Russia and they are
powerless to destroy it, since the enormous means at the disposal of
capital – the monopoly of information, the possibility of slander,
corruption, the land and sea blockade, boycott, sabotage, shameless
disloyalty (Prinkipo), violation of human rights (war without
declaration), military pressure with technically superior means – are
powerless against the faith of a people, it is historically necessary
that the other states disappear or that they make themselves similar
to Russia.

The schism of the human race cannot last long. Humanity tends towards
internal and external unification, it is tending to organize itself in
a system of peaceful coexistence which will allow the reconstruction
of the world. The form of the regime must make itself able to satisfy
the needs of humanity. Russia, after a disastrous war, with the
blockade, without aid, alone with its own strength, has survived for
two years; the capitalist states, with the aid of the whole world,
aggravating colonial exploitation for its own life, continue to decay,
adding ruins to ruins, destruction to destruction.

History then is in Russia, life then is in Russia, only in the regime
of the Councils do the problems of life and death which afflict the
world find a sufficient solution. The Russian revolution has paid its
price to history, a price of death, of poverty, of hunger, of
sacrifice, of untamed will. Today the duel arrives at its climax: the
Russian people has stood on its own feet, a giant terrible in its
ascetic thinness, dominating the crowd of pygmies which attack it
furiously.

It has armed itself all for its Valmy. It cannot be beaten; it has
paid its price. It must be defended against the hordes of drunken
mercenaries, of adventurers, of bandits who want to bite out its red
and beating heart. The allies are natural, its comrades from the whole
world, who must raise a warrior roar which will make its shock
unstoppable and open the paths for it to reenter the life of the
world.